CONCEPT
Ethnomethodology
Harold Garfinkel's 1967 sociological framework treating social order as an ongoing interpretive achievement produced through members' methods for making sense of each other — the methodological foundation of Suchman's work on human-machine interaction.
Ethnomethodology is the sociological tradition founded by Harold Garfinkel at UCLA in the 1960s, studying how members of a society produce and sustain the sense of ordinary social order through their everyday practices of interpretation and interaction. Where conventional sociology took social facts as given and asked how they produced outcomes, ethnomethodology asked how the appearance of social facts was produced in the first place — through the moment-by-moment interpretive work of participants. The tradition gave Suchman her methodological foundation: close attention to actual practice, analytical suspicion of abstract models, and the insistence that intelligence and order are ongoing accomplishments rather than structural properties. Without ethnomethodology, Plans and Situated Actions is not possible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Garfinkel's founding text, Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), introduced a radically different way of doing sociology. Rather than explaining behavior through macro-structures (class, institutions, norms), ethnomethodology analyzed how participants themselves produced the recognizable features of social scenes through their interpretive work. The famous 'breaching